For those of you who think that King Crimson is some has-been dino rock band that's trading in on past glories (Page/Plant anyone?) then you're sadly mistaken. King Crimson were, perhaps, the most influential of the bands to emerge from the late sixties. It wouldn't be too far off saying that the first Crimson were the Nirvana of their time except that's saying it a bit ass-backwards. Their 1969 debut, In The Court of The Crimson King, was to have the same effect on the '70s that Nevermind would have on the '90s. Both were great, ground-breaking records but they also cleared the way for a slew of bad imitations that became known as progressive rock and grunge.

It waits to be seen how much of an effect Nirvana will have on future generations but Crimson's reach extends right into the '90s. The bleak, dissonant sounds that bands like Soundgarden, Helmet, and Shellac utilize in their music were mapped out some 20 odd years earlier by the 73/74 edition of King Crimson. Sabbath and Zeppelin had to rely on stage theatrics to play up their dark side while Crimson just sat there and let their music do the talking. Their dark, complex pieces were largely improvised and brought the listener on a journey through the parts of the psyche that would make Trent Reznor shit a brick. If you've got the bucks then you can find out for yourself on The Great Deceiver, a 4 disc box set of live material from that period. Those on a tighter budget should grab Red, an album whose fans include The Jesus Lizard and the late Kurt Cobain.

Fed up with the music industry, Robert Fripp, guitarist and defacto leader of King Crimson, broke up the band just before the release of Red. But in 1981 he assembled a new band that lasted until 1984 but became a big influence on yet another '90s band, Primus. Listen to "Jerry Was A Race Car Driver" and then "Elephant Talk" from Discipline. The '80s edition of Crimson dropped, for the most part, the dark, improvised soundscapes of previous Crimsons in favor more pop oriented songs with interlocking guitar patterns ala Philip Glass, polyrhythmic drumming, and funky bass lines; a rock gamelan that made a sound that could "shred wallpaper at three miles." Crimson combined this music with cutting edge technology (guitar synths and electronic drums) to produce a multi-cultural weave that was light years ahead of its time. You know there's something terribly wrong with the world when music that's 10 years old sounds more modern than the majority of today's music.

If you need anymore convincing about how relevant Crimson is to the '90s then just take a look at the liner notes of some recent releases. Robert Fripp has played on albums by techno-ambient artists like The Orb, Future Sound of London, and The Grid. Let's not overlook the fact that there probably wouldn't be an ambient scene if Fripp and Brian Eno didn't get together to make albums like No Pussyfooting and Evening Star. On the other end of the electronic spectrum there's Fripp's comrade in arms from the '80s Crimson, guitarist & vocalist Adrian Belew. His guitar playing has graced the albums of alternative pioneers like Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and, most recently, on Nine Inch Nails', The Downward Spiral.

So now that you're indoctrinated on the ways of Crimson's past, it's time to bring you to the future. King Crimson 1995 is a 'double-trio' consisting of the members of the '80s Crimson-- the aforementioned Fripp and Belew on guitars, monster bassist and stick player Tony Levin, and drum god Bill Bruford-- plus newcomers Pat Mastelotto on drums and Trey Gunn on stick and Warr guitar. This Crimson is potentially the greatest of them all. Its sonic vocabulary draws upon the dark intensity of the instrumentals from 73/74 incarnation and the polyrhythmic interplay and pop songcraft of the '80s to make music for the next century. The group released an EP of rehearsals, VROOOM, last fall and recently completed a tour in support of their full length album, THRAK. (Grab VROOOM if you want more muscle behind your music or THRAK if you want more bang for your buck.) As one might imagine for a group of this size, Crimson '95 create a sound diverse enough to cover all ends of the musical spectrum. The industrial, free jazz, metal stomp of "THRAK" could go head-to-head with Ministry (and win) while their ballad, "Walking On Air" sounds like it could have come off of The Beatles', Abbey Road. Sort of like "The Sun King" meets the backwards guitars of Hendrix's "May This Be Love". The power of these songs becomes even more apparent when seen live. Like the all previous Crimsons, and any good rock band, King Crimson 95 is in its main element when playing before an audience.

The Crimson tide rolled into the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank on June 6 and swept away everything in it's wake. The band played most of the material from THRAK combined with a mix of '80s classics like "Indiscipline" and "Elephant Talk" and polished off instrumental warhorses like "Red" and "Lark's Tongue In Aspic Part 2" from the 73/74 era. It sounded as if the '70s instrumentals were written for King Crimson 95 because they gained a depth and weight not present in the performances of the 73/74 edition of Crimson. Drummers, Mastelotto and Bruford, had an almost symbiotic link with each other where Bruford playing wickedly intricate, yet tasty, fills while Mastelotto kept the beat going and added his own flourishes to the mix. Fripp, perched on a stool, stayed in the shadows unleashing beautiful, yet eerie, washes of swirling voices via his Frippertronics setup while ripping into solos, that would have been at home with Helmet's more dissonant moments, when the occasion deemed it proper. Levin held everything together with his deeper-than-Barry White bass playing. Belew made his guitar sound like an elephant, a flock of seagulls, dinosaurs in a daziling display of guitar virtuousity. Gunn's stick playing jumped around the spectrum, providing support for Levin on the low end and shredding along with Fripp and Belew in the high end. The band unexpectedly broke off into a jazzy improv in the middle of THRAK's stomping. Adrian Belew drew up a piano sound on his guitar via synthesizer and started to plink away while the rest of the band came to a halt and improvised around him before crashing back into the main theme several minutes later.

As you could probably guess, things got a bit complicated on stage. When I talked to stick player, Trey Gunn, I asked him if it was a problem finding parts to play in a group with so many members. "It's more of an ensemble kind of playing than you would normally get in rock n' roll. Usually, everybody kind of has their own territory and does whatever they want in that territory. You can't really do that in this group. It needs to be more organized and a little more thought needs to be put into who's covering what territory when," said Gunn. How about the improvised part in THRAK? Do you plan out who's going to lead the band into unknown territory? "We haven't really discussed anything about what we're gonna do for that. The drummers' have a couple of things that they can pull out and cue on the moment but generally we just go for it."

When asked what track from the new album best represented the new Crimson, Gunn responded, "Unfortunately no particular track does. The thing that's most interesting about the band is we cover so much more territory than you would usually expect from one band." On the studio recordings, Crimson doesn't actually sound as if they're fully utilizing their self-declared 'double-trio' concept. I asked Trey if they've had any progress in soundchecks or rehearsals. "Unfortunately, we haven't been able to do any work at all during soundchecks. We were hoping that we'd be able to write some more material but there just hasn't been time. We have been experimenting with different textures but we haven't been able to do any writing. I think we're gonna do that in some smaller groups over the summer for a few days." So there's definitely going to be another album? "Yeah, definitely. We have the live record coming out and we also have quite a lot of intersting outtakes from rehersals that we'd like to release. The next studio record may not even be recorded next year. It depends on when we have the material. When we've got the material we'll record it."

So the future looks bright for the Crimson King. You'll forgive me if I talk about the band like they were the second coming but they're really a breath of fresh air in a time when rock sounds like it never got past the 70s. No, Crimson are not the band for everyone but I do think that they have something in their repertoire that anyone could appreciate. Their heavier instrumentals do take an effort to digest but the songs from the current & '80s editions of Crimson can be appreciated at a 'gosh, wow,cool' level by the avergage Z100 listener. While that may not sound like a good idea just imagine what it would be like if some teenager bought THRAK because s/he heard a song on the radio and actually LIKED the more dissonant thrashing of the title track or the polyrhythms of the drum duet, "B'Boom." Instead of Weezer selling millions you might find kids buying stuff that really is alternative, like Sonny Sharrock. Well, one can hope... It would've been a real coup if King Crimson played Lollapalooza. Hey, if Crimson disciples like Primus, Rollins Band, and The Jesus Lizard could then why not Crimson? Although, moshing has become a bit passe these days, I really wanted a pit to start up at the Red Bank show just to shake up the complacent middle aged idiots screaming for Crimson's '70s material. Songs like VROOOM, "Thela Hun Ginjeet", and THRAK would've caused more bruises in the pit than a pack of drunken frat-boys.

Crimson are criticized for being overly-intellectual and while there's an element of truth in that statement, I think that it's more appropriate to say that they make intelligent music. They're not elitist snobs trying to prove that they're superior to everyone else. What King Crimson have always tried to do is to expand rock beyond it's blues based roots just like Liz Phairand PJ Harvey are trying to expand rock beyond it's usual macho conventions. There's nothing wrong with the blues but rock, of all music, should not limit its vocabularly. After all it started out as a bastard of blues, R&B, gospel, and country. Why not mix it up with other music? What King Crimson dared to do when it started in 1969 was to ask the question, "What would it sound like if you mixed the power and passion of Hendrix with the vocabulary of Bartok or Stravinsky?" And later Crimsons would ask, "And what if The Talking Heads or Phil Glass showed up at that same gig?" It's all just an extension of what Chuck Berry did when he married a hill-billy beat to his blues guitar when he wrote "Maybelline."

The great Lester Bangs said, "Rock and roll is not an 'artform'. Rock and roll is a raw wail from the bottom of the guts." But I think he's wrong. So what if the wail came from the brain instead of the guts? You don't have to understand the music as long as it moves you or to put it in more direct terms... If it shakes your ass and pisses off conservative weenies then it's rock and roll. If we're going to be so narrow in our definitions of rock it's no wonder why The Offspring sell millions while The Ramones are in danger of breaking up and it's already too late for Living Colour. I suppose all rock is nowadays is three chords and a Spike Jonze video. I'll wind down this sermon by paraphrasing Nick Kent's review of Television's Marquee Moon. The reappearance of King Crimson "at a time when rock is so hopelessly lost within the labyrinth of its own inconsequentiality, where actual musical content has come to take a back seat to 'attitude', and all that word is supposed to signify, is to these ears little short of revolutionary."

Look for Crimson's official bootleg from this tour,B'Boom, to appear in stores on Aug. 22nd through Fripp's independent label, Discipline Records.
Or call Possible Productions at (310) 435-5901.
This article is copyright 1995 by Howard Shih and Smug Magazine. Feel free to copy this this article as long as you remember to give the author credit.